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Clad in a black tailcoat and ivory-coloured vest, Michael Hackenberger is in the bowels of Oshawa’s GM Centre, waiting for his elephant.

The Bowmanville Zoo owner is the master of ceremonies at this evening’s circus, where Limba, a lanky 50-year-old with deep brown eyes and a speckled trunk, will be the main attraction. She is due to arrive shortly.

Outside the arena, about a dozen protesters approach circus patrons to join their campaign to “Free Limba,” the sole pachyderm at the Bowmanville Zoo — and the oldest elephant in Canada. They believe she should stop performing, and be retired to an elephant sanctuary.

Hackenberger knows she is a controversial star. He worries that the protesters may try to stop the truck carrying Limba and her keeper, Robert Crawford. With the semi-trailer a few minutes away, he gets a call from the driver.

The concern, however, is for naught. The back parking lot is quiet as the truck pulls in and the trailer doors slide open, revealing Limba’s enormous backside.

One foot at a time, the 8,000-pound pachyderm steps down onto the asphalt.

“OK,” Hackenberger says, coaxing her into the arena with his booming voice. “Come here, princess.”

Limba slaps her cheek with her trunk, clicks her tongue and lets out a loud, high-pitched, “Eeeeeeeeee!”

“Look at that elephant,” Hackenberger says. “That’s a happy elephant.”

Duelling perspectives

Like parents locked in a custody dispute, all those with a stake in the battle over Limba claim to be the arbiters of her happiness.

For nearly 15 years, Limba has done shows at Bowmanville Zoo, and travelled to community events, Hindu weddings and circuses across the country — activities Hackenberger credits for her good health and vitality.

But with Limba’s sunset years well upon her (by some measures she has already exceeded the average lifespan of Asian female elephants), pressure is mounting from animal rights groups who believe they know better.

Earlier this year, the California-based organization In Defense of Animals, in naming Bowmanville the second-worst zoo for elephants in North America, described Limba’s life as “miserable” and “lonely.”

Outside the arena in Oshawa, a protester hoists a placard affixed with a close-up of an elephant’s face and the words, “Sad eyes don’t lie.”

“I just try to put myself in her position,” says protest organizer Nic Wilvert. “When you’re with this elephant, you just get the feeling she wants help.”

For Hackenberger, a self-described “old-school animal manager,” who raised his teenage sons in a red brick house at the zoo less than 20 metres from the elephant barn, the criticisms are deeply personal.

“I go on their websites, and it’s almost like a social club,” he says of the activists. “They carpool. (They decide) who is going to bring the sandwiches. It’s recreation for them. This is not recreation for me.

“I have committed to this industry and this way of life on a level they never have,” he says.

It is a depth of passion that is common in the elephant community, where debate is intensifying over how to care for an aging population of large animals that were taken from the wild a half-century ago.

“A lot of them are these odd elephants — these hand-me-down, orphan creatures that have been passed around,” says Susan Nance, a historian at the University of Guelph and author of Entertaining Elephants.

From the Toronto Zoo elephants’ impending journey to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in California to the Calgary Zoo’s efforts to relocate its brood to a warmer climate, the decisions are never without controversy.

“What people are arguing about is, ‘What is the meaning of the experience of this particular elephant?’” says Nance. “It’s symbolic of who we want to believe we are as human beings.”

A sad history

No matter where they stand in the elephant debate, those who have worked with Limba agree that she is a gentle soul with a tragic past.

Limba was born in Asia in the mid-’60s, before regulations were applied to the importation of exotic animals into North America. The circumstances of her capture aren’t known, but a scar around her front left calf, visible in a photo taken shortly after her arrival at a zoo in St. Felicien, Que., suggests that she was snatched with a rope, perhaps from Thailand or Vietnam.

The only elephant at St. Felicien during the nearly 30 years she spent there, Limba passed long, inactive winters in the barn alone, Hackenberger says. Her nails were left to grow out, and she was so weak and disoriented that when the doors to her outside enclosure were opened mid-May, it would take her several days to step into the sunlight.

Shortly after Hackenberger purchased the Bowmanville Zoo in the late ’80s, he traded two African elephants for Limba, “because she was going to die,” he says.

“She was skin and bones and she just wasn’t doing well,” he says.

Carol Buckley, a former circus trainer and now staunch opponent of traditional elephant management methods, was working at Bowmanville shortly after Limba’s arrival.

“She would just wander around in a fog,” says Buckley, who compares Limba’s upbringing to “growing up in a closet.”

“She lived with a total lack of stimuli so she really learned nothing,” Buckley says. “Even though she was really sweet, she didn’t have any self-confidence.”

Behaviours that came naturally to other elephants were foreign. When Limba learned to rest on her side, she couldn’t get up. On several occasions, Hackenberger had to commandeer a crane to lift her to her feet.

Although in the wild, female elephants never leave their herd, Limba had trouble integrating with her kind. There were a half-dozen pachyderms at Bowmanville when she arrived, but her inability to make “normal elephant noises” meant she couldn’t communicate; when keepers left her with the herd, she would panic, Hackenberger says.

Hackenberger was actively looking for another home for Limba when his son, Kurt, was born in 1995. When Limba was with the baby, her eyes lit up — “She just went crazy,” Hackenberger says.

As she spent more time with Kurt, Limba’s confidence grew. Kurt learned to walk holding onto her trunk. When a wolf approached the sandbox where Kurt was playing, she positioned herself in front of the boy.

“She wasn’t repaired through other elephants,” Hackenberger says. “She was repaired through a relationship with a young man.”

The day before the circus in Oshawa, Limba was outside her barn at Bowmanville with her keeper, surrounded by kids. She swung her trunk back and forth, investigating the children with powerful inhales. As they ran their hands over her rough skin, she looked at ease, non-fussed.

“Is she a normal elephant? Not really,” Hackenberger says. “This is the elephant of our childhood mythologies. This is what we believe elephants are. Not many are, but she is.”

Conflicts about training

To those who object to traditional training methods, Limba’s day-to-day life is a textbook example of everything that’s wrong with the historic human-elephant relationship.

According to Mel Richardson, a U.S.-based wild animal health consultant who got his start in zoos and circuses in the ’70s and ’80s, there’s only one way to train an elephant to do tricks.

“They literally have to be broken,” says Richardson. “It means breaking their spirit. It means that they depend on you.”

After trainers poke and prod baby elephants into submission with a “bull hook,” a fibreglass stick with a pointed stainless steel end, the presence of the tool is a fearsome reminder of the pain it inflicted, he says.

“It’s very much like holding a gun to your head,” says Julie Woodyer, campaigns director for Zoocheck Canada. “I don’t need to use the gun for you to do what I ask you to do because you know what it’s capable of.”

Richardson, Buckley and others advocate losing the bull hook, and caring for elephants using “protected contact,” where bars separate humans and elephants, a model first adopted in zoos (including the Toronto Zoo) for the safety of keepers.

This is a view that Hackenberger roundly rejects.

Limba wasn’t trained when she arrived at Bowmanville, a task that fell to other keepers, Hackenberger says.

He says he uses the bull hook as a guide, and relies primarily on the use of rewards — in Limba’s case, brightly coloured jelly beans — in behaviour training. As he sees it, effective trainers can use traditional methods without being heavy-handed.

“You just have a persona about you, and these guys (elephants) pick up on it,” says the 55-year-old, who has been training wild animals for movies and circuses since the ’70s. “I don’t have to do anything. They just fall into line.”

During the thrice-daily performances in the zoo’s coliseum-like ring, Hackenberger uses a dressage whip and his voice to prompt Limba. She does not appear to be straining as she balances one of her front legs on a platform, and walks in a circle around it. He puts his hand below her trunk to encourage her to sit up straight as his younger son, Dirk, does a headstand on her head.

Hackenberger maintains Limba is not acting out of fear.

“She’s a willing, engaged partner in this,” he says.

The only elephant ever injured on the job under Hackenberger’s watch was a male Asian called Vance, who broke his broke his leg during a hind-leg walk in 1990. None of his elephants have since performed that trick.

As Limba ages, Hackenberger is scaling back her travel. She is now on the road about 35 days a year, half of what she used to do. The moves in her repertoire aren’t overly challenging, “like a senior walking up stairs,” he says.

Yet her career has not been entirely without incident. In 2009, the semi-trailer transporting Limba and a pair of camels in Newfoundland was in an accident — a fact that animal rights’ activists often offer as proof that her interests are not being considered.

But Limba was uninjured — evidence, as Hackenberger sees it, that he takes proper precautions.

“She goes down the road in a vault,” he says.

When she’s not performing, Limba is with Crawford, her keeper since the mid-2000s.

Crawford carries a bull hook with a dull point, but relies almost entirely on vocal commands. When the Star visited Bowmanville, he engaged Limba throughout the day, edging her around the zoo by repeating simple directives.

When she gave rides, he tells the kids not to touch her “sensitive” ears. In the evenings, they often walk together for several hours, exploring the nearby creek and woods. During lightning storms, he sleeps by her side.

“Limba comes first,” he says. “It’s my whole life.”

Zoo versus sanctuary

Since Carol Buckleyco-founded The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn., in the mid-’90s as a refuge for the “old, sick and needy,” some have seen these natural-habitat facilities as a way to right historic wrongs and allow elephants to be who they truly are.

Buckley, who is now president of Elephant Aid International, says she feels guilty “every day” for not getting Limba out of Bowmanville and giving her the space to find her way back to other elephants.

“No matter what the history, no matter what the background, she’s living solitary, and she’s a social animal,” Buckley says. Michael Hackenberger “has all the power right now. What he has the power to do is to give that elephant a better life.”

Proponents of sanctuaries accuse zoos and circuses of exploiting elephants. But Mike Keele, an elephant expert who recently retired after more than 40 years at the Oregon Zoo, maintains that animal rights’ activists, too, are motivated by agenda.

“It’s just so nice to be able to take the elephant and glamorize it, and use it for membership drives,” he says. “Do they want the best thing for elephants? No. They don’t want any animals in zoos, period.”

He questions the level of medical care in the two elephant sanctuaries in the U.S., which aren’t accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. And with elephants being slaughtered in the wild in record numbers, he accuses these facilities of failing to promote conservation efforts.

When it comes to matters of animal welfare, Keele says it’s a mistake to paint a broad brush.

“It’s about the individual elephant. Not all elephants,” he says. “I think Michael [Hackenberger] is right to look at Limba that way — as an individual.”

Hackenberger insists money is not his primary motivation. He figures Limba will net him about $60,000 this year — a little more than half of what it costs to keep her. He is not currently drawing a salary, he says.

“As long as she’s happy at Bowmanville Zoo, she will remain at Bowmanville Zoo. The day she’s not happy, I would absolutely send her somewhere,” he says.

His wife, Wendy Korver, the veterinarian at Bowmanville, says the accusations of cruelty are taking a toll.

“What Michael stands for is excellent animal care, where he wants to give animals the best life they can have in captivity,” she says. “It’s insulting to have people scream at you and say really ignorant things to you, when all you want is what’s best for the animals.”

If Limba had been raised in the wild, Hackenberger believes she would have been “a magnificent elephant.”

But this was not her lot. He compares her to Disney’s big-eared Dumbo, who is shunned by his kind, but through a relationship with a mouse, discovers his hidden talent, and becomes the star of the circus.

After Limba’s performance in Oshawa, she is back in the ring, giving rides. In a few hours, she’ll return to her trailer, and head to Windsor overnight. There is another circus tomorrow.

No one knows how much time Limba has left on the road. But for now, at least, she will remain in the spotlight.

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